The recent scandal at UC Berkeley’s Astronomy department regarding a star Professor being accused of sexual harassment and consequently resigning from his position, has, once again, had me thinking about how institutions and organizations deal with sexual harassment. There are … Continue reading →

I’ve been a Professor for almost 13 years. During these 13 years, I have seen investment in routine academic IT infrastructures decrease steadily, while at the same time being encouraged/pushed to use commercial infrastructures. Academic administrators seem to be mostly preoccupied with … Continue reading →

Quote from an email I received from a prospective PhD student: I get the impression that if doing a PhD is really going to help push me forward on this, I’ll have to be working closely with people from that whole … Continue reading →

This is a post about CS education. It is prompted by a series of posts by Mark Guzdial in which he criticizes the pervasive belief among CS educators that when it comes to programming, there’s not much an instructor can … Continue reading →

I just came back from a week at Hacker School in New York — they invited me to join them as a resident. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and, before I forget, here are my impressions and a bit of … Continue reading →

I have been meaning to put a few of the chapters of my book here. The Code Golf Style is one of my favorites; fun too, and a crowd pleaser! I’ll start with it. Here is the complete Code Golf chapter. … Continue reading →

Back in September, I blogged about one of the the most amazing conference experiences I ever had, the OpenSimulator Community Conference (OSCC’13). This was a 2-day, purely virtual conference with a total of 360 attendees, held on an OpenSimulator virtual environment … Continue reading →

I’m happy to announce that my book Exercises in Programming Style is now available for pre-order from Amazon, and that it will be shipping starting June 9! This is the book behind the talks I gave last year at StrangeLoop … Continue reading →

I’m officially making up these new words, because they correspond to activities that I do on a regular basis and that I need to convey to my students. I hope that by giving these concepts their very own words, they … Continue reading →